Commerce Entering Borders at Speke Retail Park felt somewhere between attending a funeral and looting a shop after the apocalypse. In the Starbucks up above a baby was crying and the shelves were half empty, the closing down sale having begun yesterday. The similarities with the Woolworths wind-up are stark; unlikely stock filling the shelves, everything in disarray, understandably sullen looking staff members mixed with temporary workers appointed by the liquidators who when asked don't know where anything is. Even the sale signage in use is exactly the same.
But even as I searched the stock looking for bargains, the reason the chain is closing became all the more apparent. Everything is 20% off the recommended retail price, or in the case of films and music, as per the label. The problem is that even with this saving, Borders still can't beat Amazon and other online retailers for price, especially with travel cost factored in. I came away with Edge of Darkness and Zeffrelli's Taming of the Shrew on dvd and a Gimble.
Added together with my bus fair, I would have saved two pounds and half the morning if I'd simply order these on-line when I got up. Which I wouldn't, of course, because they were impulse buys, but if a Borders purchase can't be attractive without the smell of nostalgia what hope did it have under normal trading? If all of this wasn't bad enough, because their website had been withdrawn. I noticed a staff member had ironically had to consult Amazon for product information (the website's back up now in what looks like an older version).
Within the Speke store there's also a Game, Paperchase and the coffee shop, all still trading as normal, their staff looking across balefully at the carnage befalling the rest of the shop floor. As time moves on, I'm sure they'll become weary of the public wondering why their merchandise isn't discounted as well. What will happen to them when Borders closes its doors, will they be redistributed to other parts of the company or lose their jobs? Or will these healthy chains simply expand into the rest of the shop like a parasitic fungus growing to fill the shell of its dead host?
I wonder if you can put a price on the simple pleasure of wandering the shop and browsing through the books?
ReplyDeleteI used to do that on my day off sometimes, or on my way home from work, just losing myself for an hour or two before coming away with a book, or discovering something I had never heard of.
I will be very sad to see Borders go
that's a shame, as I heard the administrator was going to keep them going as a going concern... obviously not, because once the shelves are empty that will be it. I read that this meant there was only room in the UK market for two high street bookshops - Waterstones and WHSmiths. I said: WHSmiths is a bookshop???!?!?
ReplyDelete@scouse
ReplyDeleteThey forgot Blackwells, though of course it depends if the definition of the high street includes a shopping precinct on a university campus.